The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Tommy’s assessment of Tamkin is not far from Bellow’s assessment of Reich: “He spoke of things that mattered, and as very few people did this he could take you by surprise, excite you, move you” (p. 68). To the extent that Bellow chose Reich, he, too, is figured in Tommy. He’s also figured in Tommy, and the protagonists of “A Father-to-Be” and The Wrecker, in his tendency to complain: “You have an enviable way of referring to your troubles,” he writes to Robert Penn Warren on March 27, 1954, “as a youngest child I learned to make the most of mine.”51 When Bellow began Seize the Day he was still in Reichian therapy. Though no longer in therapy when the work was completed, he was still practicing Reichian exercises, howling in the hills around Pyramid Lake, the woods around Bard and Tivoli.52 Authorial self-pity as well as self-criticism underlie the drawing of Tommy, as comparably mixed feelings underlie the creation of Tamkin,53 even of censorious Dr. Adler, conceived by Bellow in the midst of furious rows with Abraham over money. Eighty-year-old Dr. Adler, who refuses Tommy emotional as well as financial support, “with some justice, wanted to be left in peace” (p. 36) (Moses Herzog comes to a similar conclusion when he thinks of his father having to endure “the smirk of [his] long-suffering son .… Those looks were agony to him. He deserved to be spared, in his old age” [p. 669]). When Bellow tells Berryman that “suffering is not a way of life,” he is quoting Dr. Adler, who warns Tommy “don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife” (p. 82).

  Seize the Day was the Bellow novel Bernard Malamud most admired, partly for its handling of point of view. In the copy of the novel he used for teaching, Malamud marked a passage in which Tommy braces himself to confront his father with yet another request for money:

  He had opened the Tribune; the fresh pages drooped from his hands; the cigar was smoked out and the hat did not defend him. He was wrong to suppose that he was more capable than the next fellow when it came to concealing his troubles. They were clearly written out upon his face. He wasn’t even aware of it (p. 12).

  In the margin beside the last three sentences Malamud writes “p. of v.,” to mark the moment Bellow moves away from Tommy to see him from the outside.54 The critic James Wood also discusses Bellow’s handling of point of view in Seize the Day, singling out a transition he thinks unconvincing. At the uptown Manhattan commodities exchange where Dr. Tamkin lures Tommy into losing his last $700, an old hand named Rappaport is smoking a cigar:

  A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well (p. 73).

  While full of praise for the beauty and precision of the description, Wood detects a “wobble” in Bellow’s handling of point of view:

  Seize the Day is written in a very close third person narration, a free indirect style that sees most of the action from Tommy’s viewpoint. Bellow seems to imply here that Tommy notices the ash, because it was beautiful, and that Tommy, also ignored by the old man, is also in some way beautiful. But the fact that Bellow tells us this is surely a concession to our implied objection: how and why would Tommy notice this ash, and notice it so well, in these fine words? To which Bellow replies, anxiously, in effect: “Well you might have thought Tommy incapable of such finery, but he really did notice this fact of beauty, and that is because he is somewhat beautiful himself.”55

  Bellow may be anxious here, but it is not true, as Wood implies, that Tommy is incapable of finery or wholly unbeautiful. Bellow had little time for Seize the Day in later years. “I don’t like that book,” he told Roth, “I never think about it, I never take it up, I don’t touch it” (though writing it, he told another interviewer, had given him “a great deal of satisfaction”56). Nor had late Bellow much feeling for Tommy. “I sympathize with Wilhelm but I don’t like him,” he told Roth, “but my task was to represent him not to recommend him.… Many readers assumed that as an enlightened person I would naturally be on Tommy’s side. On the contrary I saw him as a misfit wooing his hard-nosed father with the corrupt platitudes of affection, or job-lot, bargain-sale psychological correctness. I thought he was one of those people who make themselves pitiable to extract your support.”57

  “Suffering is not a way of life,” Bellow tells Berryman, “but must have a culmination.” This culmination, he continues, results in “understanding,” in Tommy’s case a product not of intellect but of the heart. Here is the novel’s oft-quoted final paragraph:

  The flowers and the lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need (p. 99).

  This need is for release, figured in Reichian terms as an orgasmic loss of self. There is also a spiritual dimension to the ending, anticipated in earlier moments of “understanding,” when self is lost in kinship with others and the world. In the subway beneath Times Square, Tommy, “all of a sudden, unsought,” feels a “general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people” (p. 70). His reaction is an equivalent to the “spring of love” that rises “unaware” in the heart of Coleridge’s ancient mariner in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” allowing him to bless creatures, water snakes, once seen as “a thousand thousand slimy things.” Coleridge’s poem is almost as important a presence in the novella as Milton’s “Lycidas,” about the death by shipwreck of his friend Edward King, quoted early in the novel’s first chapter (“Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor” [p. 11]) and alluded to at the end, in the “heavy sea-like music” that pours into Tommy at the funeral chapel (p. 99).58 A similar moment of sympathy or connection occurs when Tommy and his father are joined at breakfast by Mr. Perls, an old man as repellent to Tommy as Tommy is to his father (in an undated letter to Sam Freifeld, probably written sometime in the spring of 1956, Bellow refers to Seize the Day as a “comical-terrible thing”). Tommy thinks: “Who is this damn frazzle-faced herring with his dyed hair and his fish teeth and this drippy mustache.… What is the stuff on his teeth? I never saw such pointed crowns.” As he looks more closely, however, he “relent[s] a little toward Mr. Perls, beginning at the teeth. Each of those crowns represented a tooth ground to the quick, and estimating a man’s grief with his teeth … it came to a sizable load” (p. 26).

  Tommy affords a similar sympathetic attentiveness to Rappaport, old, blind, rich, wholly selfish, refusing Tommy “the merest sign” or bit of advice about the market. Tommy helps Mr. Rappaport across the street to the cigar store and receives no thanks at all. When he listens to Rappaport declare his love for Teddy Roosevelt, however, he begins to feel for him: “Ah, what people are! He is almost not with us, and his life is nearly gone, but T.R. once yelled at him, so he loves him. I guess it is love, too. Wilhelm smiled” (p. 86). To Ellen Pifer, an astute critic of Bellow’s novels, it is this human concern that dooms Tommy in a world of “function.”59 While helping Rappaport to get his cigars, Tommy’s shares in the commodities market (in lard, appropriately) plummet and he loses his chance to sell. Feeling figures also, Pifer suggests, in Tommy’s failures in Hollywood. Tommy is now “mountainous” (p. 35), sallow in complexion, with scruffy hair and a stammer, but in college his youthful good looks elicited an inquiry from a Hollywood talent agent who had seen his photograph in the college yearbook.60 Dropping out of college was “his first great mistake” (p. 15). He went to Hollywood on spec, changed his name from Wilhelm Adler to Tommy Wilhelm, and never got a part.61 “Don’t be afraid to make faces and be emotional. Shoot the works,” the talent agent tells Tommy before his screen test. When the agent sees the results of the test, however, he backs away. As Pifer puts it, “the screen proves drastically inhospitable to the display of Wilhelm’s ‘emotions.’ �
�62 Feeling figures as well in Tommy’s more recent loss of his job as a salesman, where, as he himself admits, it “got me in dutch at Rojax. I had the feeling that I belonged to the firm, and my feelings were hurt when they put Gerber in over me” (p. 47). Bellow sees the danger of so feeling a nature, but knows it from the inside. Tamkin asks Tommy: “You love your old man?”

  Wilhelm grasped at this. “Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother—” As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, had taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away (p. 77).

  Tommy’s capacity for delicacy of perception (Wood’s “finery”) is revealed not only in his sympathy for figures as unlikely as Perls and Rappaport, but in moments of Cheever-like luminosity, intimations of a renewed world. In the early breakfast scene, Tommy enters the hotel dining room and spots Dr. Adler “in the sunny bay at the far end.” Bellow does not describe Tommy sitting down nor does he say specifically that it is he who sees his father scatter sugar over his strawberries, but we are to assume that what is described is what Tommy sees, including the “small hoops of brilliance … cast by the water glasses on the white tablecloth, despite a faint murkiness in the sunshine” (p. 26). This delicate perception is registered matter-of-factly and all but wiped from the reader’s memory a few pages later when Dr. Adler watches him eat a boiled egg. “A faint grime was left by his fingers on the white of the egg after he had picked away the shell. Dr. Adler saw it with silent repugnance” (p. 30). Toward the end of the novella, however, the image of reflections as “hoops of brilliance” recurs. As Tommy considers life in New York, concluding “that everybody is outcast,” bewildered, alone, misunderstood, a “queer look” comes over his face, out of nowhere, as it were, like the ancient mariner’s “spring of love,” moving his thought “several degrees further.” What now he understands is that “there is a larger body from which you cannot be separated” (as the mariner concludes that “the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all”). At this point the “hoop of brightness” formed by the water glass becomes “an angel’s mouth,” suggesting, in a way intelligible to the heart if not the intellect, that “truth for everybody may be found, and confusion is only—only temporary” (p. 70). At such moments, Tommy realizes that finding truth is “the business of life, the real business … the only important business, the highest business” (p. 46).

  For all his slovenliness and childishness, Tommy is both capable of “finery” and “somewhat beautiful himself,” in his sensitivity, sympathy, and concern for higher things. There is evidence to counter Wood’s reading, evidence that helps to explain the offense Bellow took at Brendan Gill’s condescending review of the novella in The New Yorker (“Long and Short,” January 5, 1957). In the review Gill calls Bellow “one of the three or four most talented writers to come along in this decade,” but he also describes Seize the Day as “a hell of gross, talkative, ill-dressed nonentities, offensive to look at, offensive to listen to, offensive to touch. But it is a true hell and its denizens are very much alive; against all our wishes, we look at them, listen to them, and reach out and touch them.” Gill’s distaste for the novella’s Upper West Side milieu recalls James on the Lower East Side. The “denizens” he finds so offensive are Jewish. The review ends: “Someday, Mr. Bellow is going to abandon his hell of odious and uninteresting people, and, oh, how willingly we are going to follow him!” Such sentiments recall the sources of Bellow’s combativeness and suspicion. “That New Yorker outfit is a strange one,” he writes to the critic and editor Granville Hicks in an undated letter of early 1957. “First they give me a chance to beat up on A[nthony]. West which, like a gent, I refuse. Then they give my next book to Gill knowing full well (Wm. Maxwell was present) that Gill and I have had a hassle. Strange people. But I tell you this, I have no desire to understand them.”63

  TIVOLI WAS FREE OF Scandinavian builders around the time of the Thanksgiving feast. What followed was the worst winter in years. The Hudson froze, guests who came for meals were unable to get home. To Sasha, “it was a challenge. I had a great deal of fun becoming very expert in the kitchen.… I baked my own bread, I baked everything. You couldn’t find anything up there.” To buy decent provisions involved “a long haul” over treacherous roads, to Rhinebeck or Red Hook, with stops at farms along the way for produce. If Bellow accused Sasha of having extravagant tastes, she accused him of being fussy about food and drink, like Moses Herzog who was “normally particular about food” (p. 417). “Although he liked to bill himself as a man of simple tastes,” she writes in the memoir, “he actually was anything but. He enjoyed good wines, he expected the very finest food, he had lived in France, after all, and had developed some high in the instep preferences” (p. 96). He also, for all his need for quiet during the day, liked company at night, and was pleased when visitors came for dinner.

  As winter wore on, Sasha’s morning sickness persisted. More worrying symptoms appeared. Violent nosebleeds and wrenching cramps landed her in the Rhinebeck Hospital “next to a woman who was torn up from delivering a fourteen pound baby” (p. 94). She was diagnosed with gall bladder disease and thought to be in danger of diabetes. State troopers took to stopping by the house regularly, worried about getting Sasha to the hospital on days when the weather was particularly bad. Though Bellow was frequently away, teaching or having meetings in the city, there were “lots of people around, and I didn’t feel neglected.” Jack Ludwig frequently dropped by. In late January, however, with the baby due in a month and a half, Sasha began to retain fluids; by the beginning of February she was confined to bed. Finally, on February 19, three weeks overdue, Adam Abraham Bellow was born, weighing under six pounds, healthy and in good voice. Sasha describes herself as “enthralled and awed. And exhausted” (p. 94); Bellow, too, was deeply moved: “He came into the room and he was very excited. There were tears in his eyes: ‘He looks like he walked all the way. He looks like he walked all the way’ ” (because the baby’s feet were red and wrinkled at birth). There had been a lengthy wrangle over names: Lisa for a girl, after Bellow’s mother, caused no problem, but Sasha vetoed Abraham for a boy. “ ‘I don’t want an Abie,’ I said. ‘How will he bear it growing up in Dutchess County with such a name, not a Jew in sight.’ ” Bellow gave in, countering that he wouldn’t have “one of your Catholic names like Timothy.” Only after the birth was “Adam Abraham” agreed to, “while the nurse stood patiently by the bed waiting to write down the name” (p. 94).

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the birth Bellow was in Minneapolis to begin teaching. It would be another month before Sasha and Adam could join him, traveling by train not plane, on doctor’s orders. Bellow’s arrival in Minnesota was announced on March 3 in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune under the heading “Prize Author Returning as ‘U’ Lecturer.” According to the article, he would be holding classes on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Chekhov, and Thomas Mann, and nonstudents could audit his classes for a modest fee.64 Bellow was happy to be back in Minnesota. He liked Ralph Ross and had a number of good friends at the university. In addition to the McCloskys, John and Ann Berryman (a second wife, married in 1956, a week after his divorce from Eileen) were in residence, John having been appointed in the previous year by Ross. Allen Tate, whom Bellow had known for many years, was a new professor in the English Department. Robert Hivnor, his playwright friend, was there, teaching freshman English. The influence of the older WASP professors had been diluted by figures closer to Bellow’s age or background, including Leo Marx, Murray Krieger, and William Van O’Connor, though how much contact he had with English Department types is not clear.

  On April 13, 1957, Ralph Ross wrote to Phil Siegelman to say that “Saul and Sasha seem settled, and relatively happy,” though Sasha had a recurrence of gall bladder trouble and might need an operation. In her
memoir, Sasha says nothing of ill health, describing herself and Bellow as having had a “surprisingly good time” in Minnesota (p. 95). Bellow’s close friendship with Berryman was now matched by Sasha’s friendship with Berryman’s wife, Ann, who had given birth to their son, Paul, just weeks after Adam was born (Ann, too, was a Bennington girl, at the same time as Sasha, though they had not met there). “We drove around together,” Sasha recalls, “lulling our boys through colic, soothed by the motion of the vehicle” (p. 95). Social life for both couples revolved around the McCloskys, as it had for Bellow and Anita in 1946–48. After Tivoli, Sasha was grateful for the spring weather and the easy domestic arrangements. The furnished semidetached house Bellow had rented near the campus was “heaven,” not least because “it was small, thankfully.” In Minneapolis there was a diaper service, milk was delivered to the door, “and I could hop in the car and drive anywhere in a few minutes. There were people to meet and to be entertained by. No major cooking or changing sheets and cleaning up after a stream of visitors” (p. 95).

  On April 9, a memorial meeting was held at the University of Minnesota to honor Isaac Rosenfeld and to raise money for his children. Rosenfeld had been brought to the university in 1952 by Ralph Ross and had taught in the Humanities program for two years. Rosenfeld had been a much loved figure, popular with students and faculty alike, and when he left to take a job in the Humanities program at the University of Chicago even his closest friends were surprised. Ross came up with the idea of the memorial and Bellow and Berryman were involved in the planning. “By one count there were 517 people present,” Ross wrote on April 13 to the Siegelmans (who were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Phil on a Ford Fellowship). “People sat in the lobby, in the gallery all around the head of the stairs, completely covered the stairs themselves, and some were standing.” Bellow, Berryman, Ross, and Allen Tate spoke on the panel, and Berryman, Ross reported, “was in top form, witty, charming, and pointed.”